Lifestyles of the Rich and Water-Wasting: L.A. Home Used 11.8 Million Gallons in a Year
Lakes have dried up, the ground is sinking in the central part of the state because of lack of groundwater, farmers are expected to lose nearly $2 billion in 2015, and residents of Los Angeles are being ticketed for watering their lawns on non-designated days. But California’s catastrophic four-year drought didn’t stop a residence in Bel Air, the hyper-wealthy enclave on the West Side of L.A., from using 11.8 million gallons of water in just one year.
That’s the startling finding of an investigation by Reveal, a website run by the Center for Investigative Reporting. It found that for the calendar year ending in April, a household in the ritzy neighborhood—Jennifer Aniston, Madonna, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, and Kim Kardashian and Kanye West have all called Bel Air home—used that much H2O, racking up an estimated $90,000 bill along the way.
RELATED: In 40 Seconds, See How Six Months of Drought Decimated a California Lake
Having a hard time wrapping your head around how much water 11.8 million gallons is? Well, it’s the equivalent of the average usage of 90 households, according to Reveal.
It turns out that four of the five biggest water hogs in California all live in Bel Air—the other household in the top five is in well-heeled Beverly Hills. Overall, Los Angeles is home to “92 of the top 100 residential water users known in California,” says Reveal. And those households, which each used more than a million gallons of water, are all in wealthy neighborhoods of the city.
Elected officials and environmental activists across California have asked people to conserve water by replacing their lush green lawns with drought-tolerant plants, taking shorter showers, and turning off the tap while brushing their teeth. If folks refuse to comply voluntarily, there’s always public shaming.
The website for the City of Los Angeles has a section where people can tattle about water wasting in their neighborhood. Folks have also taken to posting the addresses of people watering their lawns or hosing down sidewalks on social media, and a slew of drought-shaming apps make it a snap to photograph the homes of offenders.
RELATED: 5 Ways People Are Drought-Shaming Their Neighbors
Yet most water agency officials across California, including in the state capital, Sacramento, wouldn’t share water usage information with Reveal. A top official from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power agreed share data but refused to disclose the identities of the homeowners in Bel Air using up so much water. Back in the late 1990s, thanks to pressure from tech execs living in Silicon Valley, the California legislature made it legal for public utilities to keep the names and usage amounts of customers private.
Martin Adams, a manager at the department, told Reveal that there’s nothing illegal about a household using that much water, despite the dire drought conditions. “There’s no ordinance on the books in Los Angeles to go after an individual customer strictly for their use,” he said. As long as the property owner keeps on paying the bill, being a water hog is not a problem, apparently.
“That’s asinine. These are the people that people should be going after,” David Wilson, one of the Angelenos fined $600 in recent months for watering on the wrong day and letting water from his sprinkler system flow into the street told Reveal.
This isn’t the first time the water usage difference between the haves and the have-nots has been observed. During a particularly heated round of drought shaming late last spring, people began tweeting pictures of overhead shots of the green-as-Ireland lawns of celebs such as Oprah.
“The class differences are very real,” Jon Christensen, an environmental historian at UCLA, told The Guardian in May. “There are people in very poor neighborhoods who do not use much water anyway and who cannot decrease their water much more.”
Related stories on TakePart:
• A Scary New Number Shows Just How Bad the Drought Is
• 7 Wild Animals Struggling to Survive California’s Extreme Drought
• 7 GIFs That Will Convince You Just How Scary the Drought in the West Is
Original article from TakePart
